If you are an executor, there is a question you have to answer before the house gets cleared, and it catches people out because it sounds far grander than it is: what were the contents worth?
Every estate has to account for the deceased's possessions. Not the property, the things inside it. Furniture, jewellery, the car, the tools in the shed, the pictures on the wall. And the valuation has to be a reasonable one, made at the date of death, not a number picked to make the paperwork easier.
We work with executors, solicitors and families on probate clearances across Cornwall, and this is the part that most often gets done in the wrong order. Here is what is worth understanding before you let anybody empty the house.
We are a clearance firm, not valuers, solicitors or tax advisers. Treat the below as what we have seen rather than as advice on your estate, and check anything specific with the solicitor handling the probate.
The standard is open market value, not what you would get on the day
The figure an estate needs is what the items would fetch on the open market between a willing buyer and a willing seller. In practice, for ordinary household goods, that is close to secondhand or auction value.
It is not replacement cost. A three piece suite that cost two thousand pounds new is not a two thousand pound asset. It is worth what someone would actually pay for it now, which for most used furniture is a very small number and sometimes nothing.
This surprises families in both directions. People brace for a large bill and find that a whole house of ordinary contents comes to a modest figure. Others assume everything is worthless and then turn up a piece of jewellery, a set of medals or a picture that genuinely matters.
When you need a professional valuation, and when you do not
For a house of ordinary contents, executors are generally able to make a reasonable estimate themselves, room by room, keeping a note of how they arrived at it. Photographs of each room, dated, are worth taking while you do it.
A professional valuation becomes the sensible route when there is anything of real value in the mix. Jewellery, particularly gold and anything with stones. Antique furniture, and genuinely antique rather than merely old and dark. Paintings, silver, clocks, militaria, coins, and collections of anything. Also any case where the estate is large enough that inheritance tax is in play, or where the beneficiaries do not all agree with each other.
That last one matters more than people expect. An independent valuation is as much about protecting the executor from the family as it is about satisfying anybody official.
The mistake: clearing the house first
This is the one we see, and it is the reason we wrote this.
Once a house is empty, the contents cannot be valued. The evidence has gone. If a question comes back later about what was in the property, an executor who cleared it in week two has nothing to point at.
So the order is: find the paperwork, identify anything of possible value, settle the valuation question, then clear. Not the other way round. If you are unsure whether something matters, leave it in the house and photograph it.
We will raise this ourselves when we come out to quote. If we walk into a property where probate is clearly in progress and we can see pieces that may need looking at properly, we say so before we book the job, not after.
What tends to be worth something
After a few hundred houses in Cornwall, the pattern is fairly consistent.
- Gold, in any form. Broken chains, single earrings, dental gold. It is weighed, not admired.
- Tools. Consistently undervalued by families and consistently sought after. A workshop or a garage full of hand tools is often worth more than the front room.
- Medals and militaria, particularly anything documented or named.
- Specific collectables. Certain ceramics, older cameras, stamps, coins, vinyl. It is narrow and specific, which is exactly why a general look round the room misses it.
- Anything Cornish. Local pottery, mining items and local interest pieces do better here than they would anywhere else in the country.
And what usually is not worth much, however good it looks: brown furniture, dinner services, figurine collections, pianos, and books other than genuinely rare ones.
How the clearance and the value fit together
Once the valuation side is settled, the contents still have to leave the house, and that is where we come in.
Items of value that come out of a clearance go to our own auctions and resale channels, and that value comes off your clearance cost rather than into our pocket. Where a piece is better suited to a dedicated auction, antiques or jewellery for instance, we run it through our own auction and the proceeds come back to the estate after the sale closes.
For an executor, this matters practically: it keeps the cost of clearing the property down, and both streams are recorded, so there is something to show the beneficiaries. Our post on probate clearance costs covers the ranges.
Paperwork for the file
Executors need to be able to show what happened. Every job of ours comes with a waste transfer note, and we provide photographs of the property before and after the clearance. Solicitors we work with regularly get that as standard, because it goes on the file. There is more on our page for solicitors.
Across Cornwall
We are based in Hayle and cover the whole county and into Devon, working regularly with solicitors and executors in Truro, Falmouth, Penzance, Bodmin and Liskeard. We go at the estate's pace, which is often months rather than weeks.
Call 07843 930927 or email info@lanorahouse.com for a free no-obligation visit and a written price.